We must never expect from Eliade a minute treatment of sources or a detailed presentation of ideas. For him, vague, superficial resemblances are enough, suggested here and there by his summary interpretations. He is ever repeating himself, content with illustrating his intuitions by a few evocative images from his exotic albums, but he never analyses. His work, prolific as it was, produced no new concept and elucidated nothing. If the thought of Lévi-Strauss is difficult, austere, laboured, and a magnificent challenge to the wisdom of the reader, the crude convictions of Eliade seem to expect the reader to be naive, capable of being amazed by lyrical incantations and facile prodigies of erudition. Although they demonstrate vast reading, Eliade's works are nonetheless irritating. Metaphysical thesis always precedes demonstration, which is reduced to its most expeditious, that is, the accumulation of partial witnesses and arbitrary comparisons. He gives the constant impression of having read too quickly, impatient to add a new field to his antique territory. His reflection seems to proceed from a brisk sweepinga-way of data, from which he retains merely the odd superficial detail.

The interest presented by Eliade's thought, then, does not arise from his theoretical daring, from the originality of his method, or indeed from his conceptual profundity. It comes, rather, from its exemplary character, for we find in it a condensation of all the faults and abuses belonging to those mystical processes that claim scientific value.